Pennies from Heaven

Dennis Potter’s most popular television drama, Pennies from Heaven, ‘a play with music, in six parts’, was first shown in 1978 on BBC1. Set in the thirties, it concerns the amorous and geographical wanderings of a travelling sheet music salesman who is both fortunate and unfortunate enough to believe in the songs in his suitcase. When it was first shown, the movement from fact to fiction and back again, with characters miming to old recordings of thirties hit tunes to illustrate their longings, then back again to their humdrum lives, was startling and innovatory.
This volume contains a preface by Kenith Trodd, the producer of Pennies from Heaven and many of Dennis Potter’s other television dramas, including his final works, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus.